Pens for Esperanto?

This business of leaving behind Esperanto-labeled pens and defacing currency with Esperanto slogans is for the birds. It smacks of the "busy eccentrics" criticism so often leveled (with justification) at Esperantists. At best, it is a phase that an enthusiastic beginner goes through and can be pardoned for.

The first step in giving Esperanto free publicity is to learn the language yourself - really learn it, to the extent that you could give a spontaneous speech (about some topic not related to Esperanto, but to, say, some area of your work) in which you say a sentence in English, then immediately translate (OK, interpret) it into Esperanto, and then say another sentence in English, and so on. When you know Esperanto THAT well, you will be able to speak ABOUT Esperanto much more confidently, and will not be vulnerable to the obvious query, "Have YOU learned Esperanto?"

The next step is to use Esperanto to notify people of their mistakes, in cases where you would normally not notify them at all. This will mostly concern typos. When you see a typo in a website or in a book or wherever, instead of just shaking your head and moving on, you can send them a message, in Esperanto, pointing out the mistake. Let's call such messages "gratuitous correction messages". In such a case, you have full freedom to chose what language you use. (Esperanto is near poets, remember?) When you are communicating with your boss, you do not.

Esperanto will prevail only by creating significant content. Until then, it will consist only of idealists and cranks (and with a fair amount of overlap between the two). The creation of gratuitous correction messages is simply a special case of the creation of significant content, namely micro-content. And we all know the power of the micro. Small is beautiful.

Happy hunting.

- Mike Jones

Bona ideo! I have done similar things, placing stickers in odd spots on walls or elevators, writing the web address on dollar bills, leaving copies of the 16 rules or other flyers on tables at libraries, tossing the occasional Esperanto word into an email (or software docs and comments) that has absolutely nothing to do with Esperanto Oh, sorry, that's Esperanto. Sometimes the Esperanto word for something comes to me before the English and I type it without realizing what I've done. Have you heard of Esperanto? ... ;-)